-Roger Stone Indicted, Arrested

Roger Stone has been indicted by a grand jury on charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, who alleges that the longtime Donald Trump associate sought stolen emails from WikiLeaks that could damage Trump’s opponents at the direction of “a senior Trump Campaign official.”

The indictment’s wording does not say who on the campaign knew about Stone’s quest, but makes clear it was multiple people. This is the first time prosecutors have alleged they know of additional people close to the President who worked with Stone as he sought out WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“After the July 22, 2016, release of stolen (Democratic National Committee) emails by Organization 1, a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign. STONE thereafter told the Trump Campaign about potential future releases of damaging material by Organization 1,” prosecutors wrote.

Stone was arrested by the FBI Friday morning at his home in Florida, his lawyer tells CNN. He was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia on seven counts, including one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements, and one count of witness tampering.

The special counsel’s office said he will appear before a federal judge in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at 11 a.m. ET.<

We will see how far Stone’s “I’ll never testify against Donald Trump,” proclamations will go. Also of note, while the indictment details many activities of Stone’s during the campaign, Mueller is only charging offenses that occurred during the investigation. As we have learned, probably best to let this latest blaring headline breathe a bit before making wide-sweeping proclamations of its importance.

+ BuzzFeed to Cut 15% of Its Workforce

-BuzzFeed to Cut 15% of Its Workforce

BuzzFeed is planning to lay off about 15% of its workforce, according to people familiar with the situation, as the company seeks to reorient itself in a shifting digital-media landscape.

The cuts could affect around 250 jobs, the people said. The firm, among the most high-profile digital-native publishers, also is looking to realign its resources to invest more in promising areas of the business like content licensing and e-commerce, one of the people said.

The justices lifted nationwide injunctions that had kept the administration’s policy from being implemented.

It reversed an Obama-administration rule that would have opened the military to transgender men and women, and instead barred those who identify with a gender different from the one assigned at birth and who are seeking to transition.

The court’s five conservatives–Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh–allowed the restrictions to go into effect while the court decides to whether to consider the merits of the case.

The Court also turned down a request by the government to hear the matter on its merits, despite the lower court not having ruled yet. So, while the “ban” will go into effect, the controversy is not dead. The litigation in the lower courts will continue.

From the New York Times:

The policy, announced on Twitter by President Trump and refined by the defense secretary at the time, Jim Mattis, generally prohibits people identifying with a gender different from their biological sex from military service. It makes exceptions for several hundred transgender people already serving openly and for those willing to serve “in their biological sex.”

Challenges to the policy have had mixed success in the lower courts. Trial judges around the nation issued injunctions blocking it, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, is expected to rule soon on whether to affirm one of them.

…

The administration had also asked the justices to immediately hear appeals, an unusual request when an appeals court has not yet ruled. The court turned down those requests.

The Supreme Court’s rules say it will review a federal trial court’s ruling before an appeals court has spoken “only upon a showing that the case is of such imperative public importance as to justify deviation from normal appellate practice and to require immediate determination in this court.”

So, while the “ban” will go into effect, the controversy is not dead; the litigation in the lower courts will continue.

UPDATE: Some reports indicate that one injunction remains in place which prevents the immediate implementation of the ban.

+ What Happened To The 15-Hour Workweek?

-What Happened To The 15-Hour Workweek?

Well, one explanation is that there are simply more things to want. A supermarket today has thousands of options, and there will always be more things than we can afford.

Advertising—which appears on billboards, in trains and trams, on our smartphone screens, or cleverly disguised as a blog post—is now impossible to escape from, and it exposes us to a never-ending stream of products we didn’t know we needed.

These are well-known complaints. However, there’s another important and poorly understood reason for want expansion. Keynes thought that once our needs were fulfilled, it wouldn’t make sense to work more. However, it turns out that there is a certain need that requires an infinite supply of money to satisfy: the need for social status.

This ties into my writing on the UBI and why I don’t think it would end work as we know it. People will work so they can live around other people that work. So that their “station” is with those that also work.

If we had a 15-hour work week, how would we differentiate ourselves from the people that are only willing to work 15 hours a week?

-The Pending Discovery of Alex Jones

A judge in Connecticut has granted the families’ discovery requests, allowing them access to, among other things, Infowars’ internal marketing and financial documents.

The judge has scheduled a hearing next week to decide whether to allow the plaintiffs’ attorneys to depose Jones.

The plaintiffs include the parents of five children who went to the school as well as family members of first-grade teacher Victoria Leigh Soto and Principal Dawn Hochsprung, according to a statement from the plaintiff’s attorneys.

There is still quite a bit of doubt that the lawsuit will be successful, as defamation suits have a high burden to clear for public media figures like Jones. Jones and his attorney are claiming everything done by InfoWars is covered by the First Amendment, and they have plenty of precedent to stand on. Still, the fulcrum point of any civil action as to whether it is going anywhere or not is discovery, and having probing eyes into his operations is something Alex Jones cannot be happy about. Scrutiny and conspiracy is something Alex Jones is more accustom to subjecting others too. We already know, from Jones’ own lawyer in his divorce and custody case, that “he’s playing a character” on air, allegedly, so no surprises like that will be shocking. More interesting to some, however, will be the financials, plus the fact that if Jones is found not to comply it could cause even further legal complications. Laying bare the inner working of the InfoWars grifting machine will make Jones’ detractors happy, and if nothing else should be rather entertaining. Who knows what might come of it. We will see.

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+ The First Day of Amendment 4 for Re-enfranchised Voters

-The First Day of Amendment 4 for Re-enfranchised Voters

Tuesday, 9 January 2019, is the first day that some felons in Florida who previously had their voting rights removed can register to vote again under the effects of Amendment 4. The question is how exactly is that going to work?

For all the uncertainty surrounding the launch of Amendment 4 in Florida, there’s no question that hundreds of thousands of convicted felons previously unable to participate in the state’s elections will be able to register to vote come Tuesday. It’s what will happen after they register that remains unclear.

Despite assertions from Amendment 4 advocates that the changes to Florida’s Constitution are self-implementing, incoming Gov. Ron DeSantis reiterated his belief Monday that the Legislature must pass a bill to help guide the Division of Elections as it verifies the eligibility of newly registered voters. An estimated 1.2 million people are expected to regain the right to vote Tuesday as the amendment takes effect, and it’s up to the state to verify whether any of those newly registered voters are ineligible due to a disqualifying criminal offense.

For now, in order to ensure that no one is disenfranchised while the state determines how to comply with Amendment 4, the Division of Elections has stopped running new voters through its felony database. That means those who believe their rights have been restored can register to vote and likely begin participating at the very least in local elections.

This being Florida, there are more than a few concerns with implementation:

Despite assertions from Amendment 4 advocates that the changes to Florida’s Constitution are self-implementing, incoming Gov. Ron DeSantis reiterated his belief Monday that the Legislature must pass a bill to help guide the Division of Elections as it verifies the eligibility of newly registered voters. An estimated 1.2 million people are expected to regain the right to vote Tuesday as the amendment takes effect, and it’s up to the state to verify whether any of those newly registered voters are ineligible due to a disqualifying criminal offense.

For now, in order to ensure that no one is disenfranchised while the state determines how to comply with Amendment 4, the Division of Elections has stopped running new voters through its felony database. That means those who believe their rights have been restored can register to vote and likely begin participating at the very least in local elections.

But it also means that it could be weeks or even months before the state notifies any of those new voters if they’ve been deemed ineligible. And it would potentially compound any controversy should the Legislature take a restrictive interpretation of the amendment.

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+ Cyntoia Brown Granted Clemency

-Cyntoia Brown Granted Clemency

In 2004, Brown was a 16-year-old living with a man named Garion McGlothen. McGlothen raped and abused Brown; he also forced her into prostitution. It was during this time that she met and then killed Johnny Allen, a man who had raped her. Prosecutors ignored both Brown’s age and the lifetime of abuse she had endured, charging her as an adult and pursuing the maximum possible punishment for her having killed Allen. Prosecutors insisted that Brown had not feared Allen, as she had claimed, and was in fact in no danger. The jury went with the prosecutors, sentencing Brown to life in prison. A Supreme Court decision later clarified that sentencing juveniles to life in prison constituted cruel and unusual punishment, but after an appeal based upon that clarification, Tennessee’s Supreme Court confirmed that Brown would have to serve at least 51 years of her life sentence before she would be eligible for parole.

Brown was the focus of a documentary called Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story and subsequently became a cause for some celebrities, including Rihanna and Kim Kardashian-West. Brown’s case then became a flashpoint in arguments about how the American justice system valued lives, with numerous critics observing that whereas the justice system often bends over backward to excuse away crimes committed by men, it offers no such leniency otherwise. This, then, serves as a step in the right direction.

To the peeps who expressed an interest I need some questions answered for my own information. You can either post the response here, or if you’d prefer email them to me. The responses will be used for me to figure out the scenario and background for a campaign. Most likely I will end up doing…

As promised here are two cases from Avlis of magic equipped societies. I will begin with a (moderately) short description of each state, then compare the place of magic and its political economy. This post is meant as a sketch, with further development and detail to be presented based on comments received. If there are…

Author’s Note: This post is a follow-up to my original post on the political economy of magic. It’s highly recommended that you read that original post and the discussion thread after. I’m happy to see my original post spawned a slew of discussion. I found it interesting how the concerns raised by a commentariat at…

Reading through Taylor Martin’s excellent blog pointed me in the direction of a Dan Nexon post at the Duck of Minerva. Both Martin and Nexon have interesting takes on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (a League contributor favorite), but it was a throwaway line by Nexon that caught my eye. …let’s not even…

Austin Allen has a lovely post on Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time up at Big Think: L’Engle insisted that her novel be published as a children’s book, but she nearly gave up on finding anyone willing to do so. More than two dozen houses turned it down before Farrar, Straus & Giroux took a…

My sincere apologies to everyone who was, er, participating in this bookclub. With recent job changes and the holidays and some other things it sort of fell off the face of the earth. I’m not sure how far everyone read – for all I know you all gave up, or finished the book and are…

Alyssa Rosenberg and Adam Serwer both have responses up to my post on fantasy and the Anglosphere. Adam correctly notes that what I’m writing about in particular is “high fantasy” – a sub-genre of fantasy more broadly. I admit to not making my argument as clearly as I should have. So let me point out…

When I published my fantasy piece in the Atlantic it was linked (reproduced?) by Richard Dawkins’ site and a number of the atheists in the commentariat had scathing things to say about fantasy literature. Apparently it is not enough that readers of fantasy do not, in fact, believe in their make-believe. Apparently the fact that dragons…

(Minor spoilers for the Harry Potter series and medium spoilers for the A Song of Ice and Fire series contained within.) In the wake of the death of Google Reader (which is only mostly dead, I guess, but still), I accidentally sparked quite a thing on Google+ this morning. I was responding to this post…

Don’t worry, no spoilers in this review. I just finished R. Scott Bakker’s novel The White Luck Warrior (Available at Amazon) a couple days ago. It’s the second book in his Aspect-Emperor trilogy and the fifth in his series The Second Apocalypse which is comprised of three trilogies. So this is the middle book of the middle…

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians posed the question “What if your childhood fantasy turned out to be real?” Quentin Coldwater had always been obsessed with magic, and particularly with Fillory, a Narnia-like land from a series of Narnia-like kids books. Well, it turned out that a world full of magic is a lot less romantic than…

~by Ryan B. Lots of spoilers for the whole series, up to and including A Dance with Dragons. Reader beware. Now that we’re past our contretemps of the last few days, maybe it’s time to talk about things that are actually are kind of problematic in A Song of Ice and Fire. Sean T. Collins…

This old Sady Doyle post at The Awl helps me understand better where I think she’s coming from in regards to Martin’s work. After pointing out the many flaws with female-oriented fantasy, she writes: The fantasy of Girl World often feels like the feminist imagination taken to its most self-indulgent, hypocritical extremes. We stand for…

Alyssa has the best response up yet to Sady Doyle’s critique of George R. R. Martin. I realize that we’ve done this to death over the past few days, but I do highly recommend you read Alyssa’s take, if only because it’s a good feminist critique of Sady’s position. A taste: A world where women…

“If a male is intrinsically incapable of contributing valid criticism of a feminist critique, then what is the point of a male trying to understand the critique at all?” ~ Paul Crider, in a measured response to the Sady Doyle post I tried to give a measured response to the other day. This whole thing…

Spoilers for the first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire below. A few noted, minor spoilers for the last two. Sady Doyle apparently wants female characters in George R. R. Martin’s books (and fantasy in general) to not face any struggles that women in our own real-world have to face. Her very…

My second piece is live at The Atlantic. This time around I offer up some reading recommendations for those of us on George R. R. Martin withdrawals. I’m sure that I will learn that some of these books are not true fantasy that only chumps would read. Oh, and I’m sure I didn’t list someone’s…

Riffing off of my Atlantic piece, fantasy author R. Scott Bakker writes: According to common wisdom, genre fiction is culturally cyclical: It ebbs and flows in popularity as time alternately burns out various tropes and rejuvenates them. I’m just wondering if this has ever been the case with epic fantasy. It seems to me that…

~by Kyle Cupp “Have you no shred of honor?” Ned Stark asks this question to the ever-plotting Lord Petyr Baelish toward the end of A Game of Thrones. The question exposes the Lord of Winterfell’s two biggest failings: 1) he fails time and again to realize that those around him (deceitful schemers he inexplicably trusts)…

Hey everyone…big shameless self-promotion for yours truly. I’ve published my first-ever piece in The Atlantic. It’s about fantasy literature and film. I ask whether we’re in a ‘fantasy bubble’. Take a gander, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

I still haven’t seen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Deux yet, but I hear the epilogue is poorly handled. I was sort of agnostic about it in the book. Epilogues are hard. Probably Lord of the Rings has my favorite epilogue of all time, and the film totally botched it, too. Another good…

I’m going to write a few posts about Harry Potter in anticipation of seeing the latest, and final, film. Alyssa Rosenberg has a good list of the political lessons found in the Harry Potter books and films. I can’t help but take issue with her #3, however: 3. Bureaucrats are heroes. Whether it’s Mr. Wealsey’s…

You should be. But even if you’re not, this cover of the show’s theme song is sweet (via): I haven’t read anything fictional lately. Any good new fantasy stuff I should be reading before the new GRR Martin book comes out on July 12th?

(Editor’s note: Erik’s praise for “Game of Thrones” drew me out of semi-retirement. Bear with me) One of the problems with easing constraints on a creative medium is that creators are inevitably tempted to prove their boundary-pushing bona fides. Cable television has been widely hailed as this decade’s dominant cultural force, but I can think…

I have television in my house once again – for a little while. This is because it was cheaper to hook up television service when we were hooking up cable internet than to pay the set-up fee. It was actually cheaper to get television, a DVR, and HBO for one month than to pay the…

I come down closer to Jamelle Bouie’s side of the Hobbit argument than Adam Serwer’s. Jamelle argues that basically Tolkien’s story is one of the British Isles, and that the mythological backdrop of Middle-Earth is taken from Nordic and British myth. Therefore it makes sense to have light-skinned Hobbits. To draw from a brief conversation…

I finished reading Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life a few days ago. As far as young adult fantasy goes, it was quite good with more than a few unexpected twists. It wasn’t as funny as the other Chrestomanci novel I’ve read, Witch Week, but it was still very good. You can certainly see many of…

io9 lists the best science fiction novels for fantasy fans. I’m not familiar with any of these selections, but I’ll go ahead and recommend Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars.

I am perhaps four fifths of the way through the fourth of the Malazan books – House of Chains – and there is a moment in this book in which a character muses about how he’d like to do away with magic altogether. Magic courses through these books in what are referred to as ‘warrens’…

I realize that I have been teetering on the brink of some form of madness or obsession the last couple days, though I believe it was madness based on reasonable grounds and sound logic. I am not exactly sorry for this. A little madness from time to time can be a very good thing. However,…

“This book was one of my earliest introductions to fantasy and thus to the limits (or lack of limits) of the imagination. I read Dragonlance before I read Tolkien, and was just amazed by the bigness of the world. All I wanted for my tenth birthday was to swing my sword like Caramon, and get…

Will linked us to this piece by James Bowman earlier. Bowman writes: I mention this difference between the fantastical as it existed in olden times and today, which some may think a trivial one, because we are or ought to be coming to realize that acknowledged fantasy, of the kind the movies have inherited from…

Tyler Cowen and Peter Suderman have both compiled (non-definitive) lists of books which have influenced them the most over the years. I have thought about this some, and come to the decision that the books I read as a child were by far the most influential – far more influential than anything I read later…